Sweat Equity
Ten in a row. The eight-year-old aspiring baller was working toward a goal. Ten lay-ups without missing on the right side, then once we got that in the books, ten more in a row on the left. Every time she got to eight, the ball lipped off the rim.
From my rebounding spot on the baseline, I’d retrieve the ball and return it to her, starting the count over at one. After several stops and begin-agains, she started to come unwound.
“I don’t know why we have to start over,” she implored. “Why can’t we just keep going?”
“Because we’re learning to do hard things,” I said.
“I don’t really like learning,” my protégé confessed. “I’d rather just have fun.” Then out of the river of want-to inside her, hot tears began to stream.
All my little dreamer wanted was to know. The learning she could do without. Unfortunately, the two come connected like a tether ball and its string.
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The climb involved with getting to “know” is rarely, if ever, fun. The required contortions can be taxing. Time consuming. Excruciating on occasion. Sometimes it even messes with who we think we are. But the arduous groping in the dark is how you find the gold. Doing has a value that doesn’t have a price. The experience is what houses the spoils.
My little hooper-in-the-making was a bit too young to understand she was wishing away the very best part.
We do it all the time, though (even when we’re old enough to recognize the trade-off). We skim over the doing as fast as we can to get on to the getting it done. We even farm a hard thing out when possible--it’s easier and less messy to let others do the heavy lifting if we can. Why bleed and sweat and cry when you don’t have to? Most of us work the work-around more often than we like to admit, forgetting that sweat equity is an investment we make in ourselves.
A crazy contagious magic lives in the expenditure of effort, the experience of work. When we “do”, our shoulders lift and our steps have a detectable spring. When we fix the wiring, paint the room, plant the shrub, refinish the coffee table, write the proposal from scratch… the product has us in it. The things we have others do for us—especially if we could have but just didn’t do them ourselves—lack attachment. It’s easy not to care as much. It’s amazing how much harder I root for the hydrangea that I planted than I do for the one the landscaping crew meticulously put in the ground.
Investment sows perennial seeds that bloom and change the shape of things. All that matters matters a little bit more when we have skin in the game.